The Difference Engine (1990)

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling give Victorian Britain the computer age through Babbage's successful mechanical engines. Information becomes an instrument of policing, class power and conspiracy, with punched cards worth killing for. Their crowded London matters as much as the invention itself: new machinery alters institutions and opportunities unevenly. Read this dense steampunk thriller for the political uses of technology, and for a future that grows out of the nineteenth century's existing inequalities.